Far Afield Read online

  Jonathan’s ears tingled. This had the ring of authentic folk wisdom. He repeated it to himself. It justified his persisting in going to the Faroes against all his professors’ protests that this was not a foreign culture; youth paves the way to the future. But was he young enough to qualify as “youth”? Since he’d passed twenty-five, the year before, Jonathan was prey to a sense of losing time, of moving too slowly. In bad moods he made depressing calculations about how old he’d be when he finished his thesis, which, depending on how bad the mood was, varied from twenty-eight to thirty-four.

  “Johan,” said the hotelkeeper, suddenly breaking off his narrative. “Johan, you are not an ornithologist, I think.”

  “No,” admitted Jonathan. Now he felt revealed, as though he were a spy. “But how did you know?”

  “Ornithologists look like birds. I’ve seen many of them. They come here to Iceland, and they all look like birds. You know, that’ll happen with people and what they do, or their dogs, or their wives. I’ve seen husband and wife you can’t tell apart. It’s time as does it.”

  More folk wisdom. Jonathan decided to act like an anthropologist. “You know my name, but I don’t know yours.”

  “Egil. Egil is a Faroese name, from my mother. It was her brother’s name, who died in a storm once.”

  Was it possible to die twice in a storm? Jonathan feared it was. The whole world at this moment seemed a “drear place,” with the rainy darkness now as oppressive as last night’s low glare. Outside the dining room windows Reykjavik’s main street was a solid, uninviting block of cement doubled by growing puddles on the tarmac.

  “So. Are you a spy for the CIA?”

  “Is that what I look like?” Jonathan had to laugh. This was too improbable, being taken for a spy in a dump of an Icelandic hotel. “I’m a student. I study”—here he paused, because he had formulated an exact description, and this was its inauguration—“I study the folkways, the things people do from the old days. If they still hunt whales and sing the old songs and dance.”

  “A spy,” said Egil. “A spy into the past. Isn’t it so?” He laughed. Then he said, “These old ways, they are dead now. People don’t want to think about these old ways now. You won’t be getting much out of people on that score.”

  Jonathan had worried himself silly on this point for months already. “Maybe not here, in Iceland. But in the Faroes, they still dance and hunt whales. I know they do.”

  “Maybe so. Maybe they do.” Egil nodded and poked at one of the dishes of herring. “And maybe they’ll even talk to you of it. But maybe they’d rather be talking about progress, you know?” He popped a fat slice of herring into his mouth; Jonathan saw black stubs of molars marching back to his throat. “The Faroes are looking for their independence. They are thinking of their fish factories and their three-hundred-mile fishing limit and how to break from Denmark. They want”—here he couldn’t cover a smile—“to have their own foreign policy.”

  “You have your own,” Jonathan pointed out.

  “The influence of Iceland on the world—it’s like a mouse pissing into the ocean. And the Faroes! That’s like a flea pissing. We are small countries.” Egil’s eyes narrowed. Was he looking at some large, influential country on a horizon Jonathan couldn’t detect? “Small countries,” he said again. “You know that small men make much of themselves.”

  “Like Napoleon?” The conversation seemed to be drifting away from Jonathan. He yawned. “I think I’m tired,” he said. “I think I have to rest some more. I’m exhausted.”

  “Well, yes, you might be. And you’ve another long journey ahead of you. Rest up for it. You’ll be leaving tomorrow, I think. These winds are shifting.”

  But winds in the north, though they rise up quickly, die down slowly, and two more days passed before Jonathan found himself again at the airport. His baggage had turned up in Copenhagen, the derisive ticket clerk told him, and would be arriving in the Faroes within the week. On his hotel bill, Jonathan had noticed, he’d been charged for half the lunch he’d eaten with Egil. Lars had accompanied him to the movies, where they’d seen Serpico. Lars and the rest of the audience said “Bang bang” at appropriate points in the action; this was clearly not the first time any of them had seen the film.

  Overdoses of sleep, food, and Reykjavik had brought Jonathan to an expectant yet placid state of mind that seemed to him a good beginning to a journey. Long stretches of nothing-to-do had not activated a bad mood of the sort that had threatened during lunch with Egil. On the contrary, he had slipped into a tolerance of boredom that was nearly happiness.

  This calm was useful in the airplane. Without doubt it was the most nerve-racking trip he had ever taken. The plane was a Fokker from World War Two converted to a passenger plane by the addition of ten unsteady rows of seats from a bus. The one stewardess hurtled up and down the aisle, a warning to all to stay in their places. Every fifteen minutes a pocket of air threw them down or flung them up, the sensation lasting many, many seconds more than any bump or drop Jonathan had experienced on the Eastern Shuttle. Many passengers prayed, some vomited.

  After two hours of this the stewardess passed out tepid orange juice in paper cups and pieces of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum. The pilot’s voice crackled from a loudspeaker—ridiculous, thought Jonathan; the cabin was so close the pilot could have talked to them over his shoulder.

  In Faroese and Icelandic, he announced their imminent landing. For Jonathan’s benefit, he repeated this in English. Then: “Would you be so good as to sit up straight with your seat belt around you, because I think it is going to be rough.”

  If the lurches of the rest of the trip had provoked no comment from the pilot, Jonathan did not like to imagine what “rough” meant. Crash landing on the ocean? Just let me see Mount Desert again, he said, too shy to address this request to anyone in particular.

  He looked out the window: clouds, as there had been the whole time. Then came an especially deadly downward toppling, which overturned a number of juice glasses and provoked more vomiting behind him. Determined not to die, Jonathan stared fixedly out the window.

  And below him, to prove he had been heard, the Faroes came into view. Long, soft, undulating, and green, great humps and valleys of land appeared. Above each height of land a crown of clouds poised white, its excess trailing down as mist to deep dips greener even than the tops. It was land ultimate, land eternal, huge and comforting, each piece defined by the ring of breakers at its edge, all stretched out on an ocean that, from this height, curved perceptibly with the globe’s incline. The plane fell another thousand feet, and Jonathan saw a house, a bright red roof, a boat-dot on the vast green lawn that was the Faroes’ salty front yard—then, in banging and darkness from another cloud, they landed, the engines screaming, the tires bumping and smoking. The pilot turned over his shoulder and said, “Vœlkomin til Føroyar.”

  Admission

  In the matter of his suitcase, Jonathan had passed through a number of the phases of grief: denial, in which he inquired after its arrival less and less hopefully from the desk clerk at the Seaman’s Home; action, in which he besieged the Icelandair office in Tórshavn daily and oversaw the sending of telexes to all cities in northern Europe; anger, in which he wrote a stormy letter to the president of Icelandair and stirred up small vortexes in the puddles on the street with his tireless search for replacements for such banalities as underpants and pads of paper—hoping to prove these unobtainable and thereby increase the amount of his reimbursement from the airline. His success in this last effort was small comfort. Like the rich man whose wealth cannot buy him entrance to the kingdom of heaven, Jonathan loaded down with kroner was still Jonathan with no access to what he really wanted: his stuff.

  After two weeks of this—fifteen days in which the Faroes played only a cameo role, sod roofs and mysterious cloud formations just the backdrop for his interior monologue of frustration—he had come to a defeated acceptance. The envelope full of fifty-kroner notes, passed across the
desk by Daniela of Icelandair, his telex co-author, had signaled the end of his resistance. Books, sweaters, little pieces of home selected to buoy up a man during a long sojourn in foreign parts, all had been distilled down to paper. The patent inequivalency of the contents of the envelope and the contents of his suitcase gave Jonathan a pang. It was his first exposure to the reality of pricelessness.

  Jonathan woke up one morning a rich man. His grant for fieldwork had been enough to cover his airfare and a few nights in a hotel—all spent in Iceland. He had two thousand dollars from his parents, believers in higher education, and the bits of his teaching-assistant salary he’d managed to squirrel away, though these didn’t amount to much. But he had calculated the Faroese economy to be several centuries behind that of Cambridge and was sure he could live his year in the minimalist style he’d grown accustomed to as a graduate student. Now his loss, though only several hundred dollars’ worth, was in kroner enough to keep him in the Hotel Hafnia of Tórshavn for half his stay. Jonathan was practical, though, and, more than that, in mourning. He remained at the Seaman’s Home. He made a few preventive purchases—preventive in the sense of necessary and camouflaging. He had lost his American sweaters? Then he would have a Faroese sweater—and these were handmade and not cheap. He’d noticed that everyone wore black clogs with tire-tread soles against the streets’ puddles and frequent lapses to mud; he bought some too. All the men wore old flannel shirts under their sweaters. He bought a flannel shirt, and he quickly made it old by wearing it every day for a week. With his blue eyes and his brown-tending-toward-blond hair he could pass for a native. He stared at himself in the rippled mirror on the wall of his small, mean room. An American abroad? A spy? An ornithologist, maybe? He ruffled his hair to give a more ornithological appearance.

  There was so much money left he doubted he could ever spend it. Yet translated into the world beyond these islands, it was not enough to buy a round-trip ticket to England, where he could replace most of what he had lost. What he must do, therefore, was make friends and spend it on them.

  It was time to make contact. Jonathan had one contact, from the professor who’d given him private instruction in Faroese. Professor Olsen was a Runic scholar, and an Old Norse scholar, and an Old Norseman himself. Norwegian, kindly, in a philological haze at his desk in Widener, he had for the year previous been Jonathan’s only support. This was because he was not in the anthropology department. The anthropology department believed in snakes and wampum and tropical disease inoculations and the backwaters of Malaya. They did not believe in studying cultures that had newspapers, and the Faroes boasted seven newspapers, each the mouthpiece of a separate political party, one of which was edited by Professor Olsen’s friend, Jonathan’s contact, Eyvindur Poulsen.

  But perhaps today he had other things to do? Jonathan washed three of his four pairs of socks at his sink and hung them over the end of the bed. He didn’t want to make contact. With all his money, he could disappear into the countryside, take a boat to the outermost island and hide, take a boat to the Hebrides and—how similar all these options were to each other and to the only choice he actually had. He was in the north, bounded by sea on all sides, pressed in by cloud cover, and here he would stay. He went downstairs to make contact by telephone.

  Unlike telephones on the mainland of Europe, Faroese telephone was effective and prompt—rather American. Jonathan was talking to someone—not talking, that is—before he had time to prepare a speech. A woman was saying, “Hey, hey, hey?” Jonathan, befuddled, was thinking in French. “Je cherche Eyvindur,” he snapped into the line. Then he blushed. Silence on the other end; he didn’t blame her. His only concern was whether he had the courage to call back and attempt Faroese.

  “Is it Jonathan?” a mighty voice boomed into his ear.

  “Oui, c’est moi.” He realized that the only foreign language he had ever spoken over the phone was French. But that was no excuse. “Eyvindur—”

  “You are coming for dinner?” This was in English.

  “I couldn’t—”

  “You are coming for dinner. You like spik? You like it. Up the hill, number eight. You ask them. Congratulations on your departure.”

  “What time?”

  “Number eight.”

  The phone was a sleek Danish model, streamlined to a lightweight black arc. Jonathan moved it from one ear to the other, but Eyvindur had gone. The desk clerk, who had listened to this multilingual exchange wide-eyed, said, in Faroese, “You are visiting Mr. Poulsen tonight? He lives on top of the hill above the sweater store. Number eight. His house is the one with a sod roof. You are a reporter for the New York Times?”

  “Something like that,” said Jonathan wearily. He went back to his room to rehearse such phrases as “This is an excellent dinner” and “I would be grateful for your help in finding a house to live in.”

  Shortly before seven o’clock (the time Jonathan had decided he was expected), without flowers, a bottle of wine, or a letter of recommendation (first two unavailable in Tórshavn; third lost in his luggage), Jonathan set off into the evening to climb the hill to Eyvindur’s house. The day’s rain had given way to nearly warm sun that fell in long slats between the roofs and filled the bowl of the harbor with molten yellow foam. As he climbed upward, Jonathan’s view of the town improved; from the crest of the hill Tórshavn achieved an almost Italian beauty, distance obscuring the messy winches of the fishing boats and revising to elegance the gnarled geometry of the streets. Could he come to love this view? He paused by a rock to consider. On closer investigation it relapsed to ugliness: an almost determined ugliness whose components were monotony of color (black, gray, dark green) and not enough monotony of form. Big new buildings loomed over small old buildings; shops with Danish Modern fronts of pale ash and plate glass stood next to black-painted stone houses. The twentieth century seemed to have squatted and left its spoor in an almost malevolently arbitrary path.

  Jonathan knew he was a conservative in aesthetic matters, so he tried to reserve judgment on ugly, ill-planned Tórshavn. He was probably suffering some version of the anthropology department’s reverence for “authenticity.” Eighteenth-century Tórshavn would have found favor in his eyes: a string of low dark houses facing the harbor with windows shuttered against the cold. Bleak. Dreary. He thought of a sentence he’d read in a Danish guidebook to the Faroes: “The Faroese flora consist of approximately 300 varieties, many of which are moss.” They were—he was—above the timberline. Not the timberline as Jonathan knew it, that point on a mountain marking the end of pine and the start of rock and scrub, but some larger, in fact, global, timberline. The Faroes did not support vegetable growth. Things grew down to some extent: potatoes, carrots, turnips. But things did not grow up. A sparse sort of privet struggled in front of a few houses, and outside of town he’d seen fields of angelica and Queen Anne’s lace, but there wasn’t a tree on the islands.

  What a place! Jonathan sighed at the wonder and gloominess of it all. And it had begun to rain again. It was time for dinner.

  Eyvindur had a brown goatee and was under forty. He was wearing an apron and holding a five- or six-year-old girl by the hand. “Jonathan,” he crowed. “You are here. Vœlkomin.” He made a path through toys on the floor to the kitchen. “Here is Jonathan,” he said to a woman who was feeding a smaller girl pieces of meat. “Anna,” he said. “Anna and Jonathan.”

  Anna and Jonathan smiled wanly at each other. Jonathan could tell she didn’t speak English; he was developing a sixth sense for that. Something about people’s posture gave it away—a hunch, an apologetic slouch, a self-deprecatory, I-can’t-communicate expression. In a fit of generosity Jonathan said, “Pleased to meet you,” in Faroese. At this Eyvindur slapped the kitchen table.

  “He speaks!”

  “A little. Professor Olsen taught me what he knows.”

  “He knows nothing,” said Eyvindur. “He is living in the tenth century. Anyhow, he is not Faroese.” He waved his hand to brush O
lsen away. “Marta”—pointing to the meat eater—“and little Anna.” He lifted Little Anna’s hand like a coach lifts a champion’s. “You are married?”

  “Uh …”

  “Your wife, she didn’t want to live up here in the middle of nowhere?”

  “No, actually, I’m not.”

  “Good. You can marry a nice Faroese girl.” Jonathan’s face clouded. Eyvindur hit the table again. “You must forgive me. In reality, I am Italian. Anna is so disgusted with me because I do not behave. But tonight, for you, I will be very Faroese. We are eating spik. You know what’s that?”

  Anna reached into a cupboard and brought out a platter of gray slabs about three inches square. “Whale fat,” she said in English, proud of her vocabulary. “With bread,” she added.

  “It’s a joke,” Eyvindur said. “We’ll have a nice little smorgasbord. Traditional Danish evening meal. Traditionally, Faroese can’t afford to eat in the evening. It’s a joke.”

  Jonathan was befuddled. He had not expected wit, sophistication, jokes in near-perfect English. As he followed Eyvindur into the living room (“We’ll leave Anna to her duties”), he wondered what exactly he had expected. According to Olsen, Eyvindur was a devoted Independence Party leader, ultranationalist, from whom Jonathan could learn everything about native culture and history. “Dedicated,” Olsen had said, “to the preservation of the language and customs.” And so Eyvindur had been cast in Jonathan’s imagination as past fifty, pale, intent, consumed with his country’s promise.